


Useful

by yfere



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb is nicer to Gluzo because I said so, Gen, I came for a crack ship and I made it platonic like the fucktwit I am, It's platonic again you fuckers, M/M, M9 cuddle pile, Missing Scene, also i have a fixation on yussa in case you couldn't tell, that is what the tiny hut is meant for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 05:44:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17822990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yfere/pseuds/yfere
Summary: Caleb recruits a bugbear named Gluzo, and they work out his place within the M9 cuddle pile. C2E51.





	Useful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dinodo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinodo/gifts).



_Just know, anyone can be useful._

Fine advice, if a little redundant. Caleb has always been willing to find allies in unlikely places, to suss out the talents and capabilities of the people he encounters. Usefulness. In the right hands, in the right circumstances and if you’re smart enough, even the most tenuous of connections, the most mundane of tools can mean the difference between life and death. He knows this. Knew it. It’s what drew him to Nott, made him suggest they travel together for a while after they escaped from jail. It’s what made him decide to travel with the rest. Protection, options. Power, too, because who knows better than he how trial fashions people into living weapons?

The trouble is what comes after allies. His arms are cooler now, without the extra layering from his wraps, and he’s discomfited, a little, by the wet slap of his soaked coat sleeves against them as he begins to prepare the Hut. He feels—vulnerable. Has felt, for many days now. Since Felderwin, if he is to be honest, and part of him misses being able to take anonymous shelter in Fjord’s worries at sea, even as another part is sick with the realization of what that journey meant to Nott. Nott, who—

He hears a wet scraping noise and looks up, remembering the sound of the roc scrabbling though the mud. But it’s only—him, their newest and most tenuous ally, the one Caleb convinced the rest to bring on because he was too defenseless to be a threat, but was a native of the area, and could have knowledge, skills they could use.

Caleb watches him for a moment, and sees he is digging a scrape to sleep in in the mud at some distance from the rest of them, carefully angling it so that it doesn’t fill with quite as much water as he works.

Beau is by his shoulder. “Why are you stopping? We’re all _soaking_ , man, come on,” but Caleb can’t respond for a moment because he’s beset by a memory—a rainstorm, and the first time he and Nott had conned enough to stay in an inn for a night without risking starvation. He’d been so excited, _so excited_ at the idea of sleeping in a real bed again, but when Nott learned they could only afford one bed she’d thought— _assumed_ that she would be sleeping outside, or on the floor. And it was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Absolutely ridiculous.

“I want—” he coughs, then pitches his voice louder so that the others can hear him over the rain. “I want to put the Hut over him…so that he doesn’t run away.”

Beau gives him an unimpressed look. “You couldn’t do that five minutes earlier?” But Nott glances at him like she is remembering the same thing he is, and he has to look away.

He doesn’t wait for the others to weigh in. He approaches Gluzo, seemingly near finished with his bed scrape. “Hello, big fellow.”

“Made up your mind to eat me?”

“Ah, no. Frankly, I don’t have much of an appetite, tonight.” Gluzo is silent, so he presses on. “That is quite a shelter you have there. Neatly—neatly done.”

“Doesn’t stick out like tents do. Keeps the weather off okay.”

“If I may, I can do you one better. There is a bit of magic I do—it is also a very good shelter, I think. Nothing comes inside unless I want it to. So it’s warm and dry in there, and there can be no, no death from the skies. If you know what I mean.”

Gluzo gives him a look, and for once it’s assessing instead of trepidatious, or annoyed. “You do magic.”

“Many of us do. I’m not sure if you noticed in the confusion earlier, but our green-skinned friends over there cast some illusions, to try to distract the big bird.”

“Didn’t help much.”

Caleb decides it’s probably politic not to mention how well they _did_ work. “Maybe so, but I happen to know this spell of mine is foolproof, for what it does. You will be safe from everything but my good friend’s needle.”

Caleb follows Gluzo’s glance back down at his scrape. At the roof of it bowing inward in a liquid mess against the heavy drive of the rain. “The tattoo—she is good?”

“She is a very talented artist. She will probably show you her sketchbook, if you ask. But—ah, she is new, to tattooing. I’ve seen her do it before.”

Gluzo shrugs. “I have fur.”

 

 

  
If the Hut was cramped before, it will be even more so now, with the addition of yet another seven-foot-and-change sleeper. Caleb counts on his fingers and—yes, with the seven of them, Jester’s dog, and Gluzo, they are stretching the capacity of the spell.

“It’s tragic, but you have to leave Sprinkle outside for the spell to work. It only holds nine creatures,” Nott says. Jester clutches her pocket and glares mutinously at Caleb.

“No, that is more of a—guideline, for space,” Caleb says. “Sprinkle fits in your pocket, he will be fine.”

“Maybe,” Nott says doubtfully. “But bugbears _eat_ weasels, don’t they? Do you eat weasels?”

“I’ve eaten weasels before,” Yasha says. “I don’t want to eat Sprinkle though,”

“I hunt bigger prey,” is what Gluzo says, and Jester takes that as her cue to begin cajoling him to hold the pet. When she finally convinces him, it pees in his hands.

“Huh. Glad it’s raining,” he says, shaking off his hands in the downpour. Caleb completes the spell.

 

 

They decide that because Caleb was the one who invited Gluzo in, that he would be the one to sleep next to him at the edge of the dome. Well, mostly Beau decides, but the rest pitch in. “You convinced him to help us too, come to think of it,” Fjord says. “I guess that means you’re in charge of him.”

“And you have so much in common!” Jester burbles. “He’s covered in mud, and you like to cover yourself in mud!”

“It’s just muddy outside. We’re all muddy now.”

“He also played dead! You’ve played dead a couple of times now, Cay-leb.”

Caleb remembers the arrow to the book incident, and then the faked heart attack. His face heats up, and he waves her off. “Fine, fine. Off with you, now.”

And he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised, really, that Nott snubs sleeping next to him that evening for laying her bedroll by Yasha’s on the opposite end of the bubble. If her ongoing needling of their new companion is anything to go by, she is already beginning to feel a bit put upon.

Which brings them to their next problem—Gluzo doesn’t actually have a bedroll.

“I’m fine on the ground,” Gluzo says, even as Jester says “You can rest your head on Nugget! He makes a very good pillow.” But the problem ends up being solved by Caduceus, who brings four or five thick spare blankets and an arrangement of embroidered pillows out of his pack. Between that, the tea sets, and the shovel, Caleb has to wonder what else he’s carrying. “This ought to do the trick,” the firbolg rumbles, before slumping into his own little alcove. Leaving Caleb sandwiched between Beau and Fjord’s bedrolls—both empty, with Beau looking over Jester’s shoulder as she sketches, eyelids at half-mast in a way that tells Caleb she is five minutes from passing out on top of her, and Fjord wired and staring into the darkness past the dome, having insisted, as he nearly always does, to take first watch—between their empty bedrolls, and one very wet bugbear.

Caleb wonders, not for the first time, why he never learned prestidigitation. A useful trick, could help them all dry off and clean up a bit. But of course he knows why, knows what he studied instead. _He’d called them cheap parlor tricks, told them they were called to higher things—_

As if in response to his thoughts, Gluzo turns from where he’d been idly poking his hand in and out of the bubble, and looks at Caleb with something like the next door neighbor of a smile. “I like this magic,” he says.

“Oh? It does its job,” Caleb says, even as his chest warms. He likes compliments to his magic, can’t help it. Always has. Even when he knows he shouldn’t.

“Yes. It’s useful. What else can you do?” And the look on his face reminds Caleb of something else, of Fjord leaning forward over a trost, eyes sparkling at the mention of magic. He didn’t particularly like Fjord then, but he’d shown him something all the same. This time, instead of the Goblight he casts a quick disguise, so that he looks like a somewhat smaller Gluzo, complete with his new bald patch and shining tattoo.

“That’s good. That will help you a lot where you’re having me take you.”

“I have to confess, I’ve only ever read bare mentions of your city before,” Caleb says, dropping the disguise. “Do you know much about it—its history? I’d like to hear more about it. As much as I can.”

“I’m not an expert. I just live there. But I can tell you a few things, maybe.”

So he talks, and Caleb listens, until one or the other of them falls asleep.

 

 

  
Caleb wakes in the middle of the night—2:14, to be exact—to a whap on the face. Which means that at some point Beau made it back to her bedroll, and is punching things in her sleep again. Fjord’s nose is pressed into his hip—Caduceus humming absently on his watch a few feet away—and there’s a weight on his chest that Caleb mistakes for Frumpkin, for a moment, before remembering better. No, it’s Gluzo’s arm, dry now and very warm, thrown over him unaware in sleep.

 _He’s going to worm his way into your heart too, you fool,_ he thinks. _Just like all the ones before._ Twiggy and Kiri and Nila and Keg, Cali and Shakaste and Orly and Bryce and the dear, dear people snoring softly all around him. The ones who were supposed to be just shields, or stepping stones, to him.

_There’s a difference between using someone and relying on them._

Maybe. Or maybe one just becomes the other. But he’d better not think about it too hard now, and go back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I tagged this Caleb/Gluzo more out of stubborness than anything. You can't stop me!
> 
> Please let me know what you think!


End file.
